Civic hacking the Federal Register

Building an executive branch agency list using the National Archives' Federal Register API.

Luke Fretwell By Luke Fretwell · October 31, 2022

Screenshot of Department of Interior page on USA.GovFresh.

Image: USA.GovFresh

(This post is part of an ongoing series documenting adventures in father-son civic hacking.)

README

We built a listing of executive branch agencies and individual agency pages using the Federal Register API. This includes agency pages with:

  • Agency logo, description and website
  • Subagencies within the agency
  • Recent agency Federal Register documents

Data

Data used for this project:

Issues

Issues we found using the API:

  • Agency logos are poor quality.
  • Agency data (about, website) is inconsistent, needs copyediting or is empty.

Kudos

Big kudos to the National Archives for:

  • Maintaining a public repository of the data.

Demo

Executive agencies:

Screenshot of USA.GovFresh executive branch agency page

Example agency:

Screenshot of Department of Interior page on USA.GovFresh

Feedback

Share your feedback on the USA.GovFresh repo.

Photo of Luke Fretwell

Luke Fretwell is the founder of GovFresh and co-founder and CEO of ProudCity.

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License

This work by GovFresh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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